Autonomic computing reflects a vision to develop and deploy intelligent systems that self-manage and regulate themselves, much the way the human autonomic nervous system manages the human body. This vision is motivated by the tremendous complexity in today's computing environments and the resultant difficulties and expense of managing them. The biological metaphor suggests a systemic approach, coordinating activity across the many components of computing systems, achieving a much higher level of automation.
Within the context of the present invention, an application-complex is defined as multiple tiers of servers, where the servers in the same tier run the same application and those in different tiers run different applications, and all the servers work together to provide a specific service. An example of a 4-tier application-complex is a Load Balancer (‘singleton’ tier) followed by Web Servers tier, followed by web application servers, followed by a database. Such an application-complex might provide an e-commerce service. The application complex entity presents a view in which the inter-relations and dependencies, the deployment properties, and operational characteristics of the components are hidden.
The high complexity of the management tasks, and specifically the Total Cost of Ownership, involved with application-complexes including deploying, monitoring and keeping the services in ‘healthy’ operational state imposes a high overhead on system management. For example, the addition of a new server to augment an overloaded system requires constant monitoring and analysis of the system load, identification of an overload, selecting an appropriate reserve server and its configuration properties, connection thereof and upgrading system properties. Although some of these tasks have been automated, complete automation for application-complexes has not yet been achieved.
Automatic monitoring and configuration of application-complexes has been addressed by an IBM internal prototype implementation referred to as “Raquarium” that has been integrated into the IBM Director system management tool (specifically into its Rack Manager component). IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y., USA. Raquarium as disclosed in the IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1, was published on the Internet on Jan. 23, 2003. Raquarium eases management of appliance edge servers in rack-mounted and server blades environments and has demonstrated management of application-complexes in the IBM WebSphere Edge Server domain, in environment of rack mounted servers and server blades. However, Raquarium is equally well-suited for use in other multi-server environments.
Raquarium provides the following life-cycle management functions for application complexes:                automatic deployment—configures the participating servers to work together, each with its specific application component and role.        Performance monitoring and analysis which is based on the structural knowledge of the entire application complex.        Automatic server allocation and configuration provides capacity-on-demand management and hardware failover support.        
The initial release of Raquarium provides no network isolation (required for supporting multiple customers environments) such that access between servers within a cluster is not restricted. The initial release also restricts provisioning to preinstalled applications: there is currently no provision of OS and application deployment based on image repositories.